ed1234

I saw this image on Reddit's UK trains board today, and thought of this layout. Admittedly it's a modern image and of a very very small (relatively speaking!) corner of what you're modelling, but I also know that all modellers can take something out of any image, no matter how obscure, so I hope it's of some use and interest.

What a stunning result James - the amount of nerve and effort to take a pristine model (and such a finely tooled one) and deliberately turn it into something so grotty and grimy.... beautifully done. Would love to see some shots of it on a layout one day.

Hi Neill, welcome to the forum! Just in relation to older images, unfortunately there was an outage a year or so ago which resulted in the loss (unfortunately irretrievable, at least as far as the forums are concerned) of many of the older hosted images. That is probably why you're struggling to view links (images, at least) from the older posts. Hope this helps.

In all my many years of following this wonderful layout, I think this track plan is the first time I have realised that the layout is a U shape. Up to this point I always assumed the track that leads to the fiddle yard was positioned just before the station (i.e. the bridge at the neck of the station is the same as the one that, in reality, covers the fiddle entrance). Having seen the plan, it's obvious these bridges are different - not least the number of tracks. But in five or more years my brain has never connected the dots... What's for pudding, nurse?

Everything's glossy in Wales - it never stops raining 😀

@Philou, many thanks for the update. I look forward to seeing your layout progress. Mine resides still in my head and some early 3D sketches I did, pending life to get to a point where it's more amenable to layout construction.

The PTFE tape that plumbers use also makes for good cloth - it's super thin, slightly stretchy (so you can make quite good tarpaulins), creases in a reasonably scale-accurate way, can be painted and is just slightly tacky so sticks to things by itself long enough for glue to affix it permanently. But it works much better for draped materials than it does for flat materials - I'd not want to try and make a shirt out of it!

Right, so that's the prototype image. Can we have a picture of the model now please?

I suppose this is a prototype / period question: today, the equivalent of this scene would have a ten foot high metal fence between the locomotive and the two members of the public having a chat in the background, with 'Danger of death' notices everywhere and probably razor wire on top. All sensible precautions of course to keep the soft squishy humans away from the heavy metal locomotives. But in the 1930s, were railway yards really as 'open' as depicted here? Or is this modeller's licence, and the 'real' 1930s LM would have a wire fence or similar between railway and public road? I appreciate no one-size-fits-all answer, and this is a dockside scene which might have different rules (both for railway safety and public access), but just curious.

Are there any pigeon carrying vans in LM's fleet, or was that not something GWR went in for? I confess it's not my era, though I have read the parliamentary laments in Hansard when it was proposed that BR discontinue the service in the late 1970s.

Easiest way of avoiding modelling the birds is modelling the aviary door in the open position!

Given the cottage occupant is clearly a green-fingered soul (judging by their superbly kept veg garden in the back), I look forward to seeing what is going to be planted in the front garden. A rambling rose, to break up the expanse of brick? A beautiful bush of Japanese knotweed, to give the next buyer something to worry about?

This angle will always be one of my favourite examples of how clever modelling can really draw the eye away from 'faults' (and by 'fault' I don't mean something not done well/properly, I mean something that draws the eye away from the scene and throws the 'it's a model!' switch in all our brains). In this case, there are so many things to draw the eye away from the fact that the world ends after the second coach, and falls away to the great abyss of carpet below, that you have spend a long time looking before you notice that tiny gap behind the second coach. The boy and dad/grandad on the bridge, the way the wire fence swoops up to meet the bridge brickwork (drawing the eye), the tuft of hill on the other side of the bridge..... and then when your eye is 'bored' with all that, the track curving off to the right throws the 'I wonder where that goes' switch... (And I haven't even mentioned the train itself yet...) Anyway, that's a lot of words to say: great shot.

Prototype question, out of curiosity: does anyone know the purpose of the long concrete 'supports' behind the buffer stops in these pictures? They seem rather too 'beefy' for simply supporting the buffers.

As a photographer, might a camera lens blower (the sort in a rocket shape) be worth a try for agitating dust without blowing too hard? I'm surprised nobody has invented a 'static grass applicator in reverse' that you can hover over scenery to attract fine dust without exerting a suction force like an actual vacuum, though I'm sure there's a good physics reason why that's not possible...

Making books for the family is quite easy these days with the various online tools available, and while the results maybe aren't quite Taschen standards, they're pretty good. While living abroad we have made calendars and books each year of our children for my parents and in-laws, which always go down very well and take little more effort than a couple of evenings sorting photos and uploading. It helps all our photos are uploaded to Dropbox in a single folder for that year, so sorting is straightforward. I imagine making a book for publication is a different matter, especially a hard back glossy one. Though I understand Amazon has a self-publication option these days - the explosion in recent years of children's books I had never heard of is often down to talented authors and illustrators pushing something out on Amazon and it becoming curiously popular. My children were obsessed for a time with a series called Little Blue Digger which, it turned out, was an Amazon self-publication. I assume Amazon take a healthy cut.

Did gunpowder wagons typically travel in mixed rakes like these? I have an image of them being the 'nuclear flasks' of their day, on dedicated trains (or at least military only), but as smarter Spanish waiters than me have said: I know nothing.

I don't know if you did it deliberately, but putting the figure(s) on the footbridge is a really clever trick. It draws the eye away and occupies the subconscious part of my mind that is thinking "I know this is a picture of a model so I must find something that proves it" and redirects it to wistfully imagining what they're looking at (it helps that they seem to be facing away). It's particularly effective at this point on the model where the viewer needs the most 'distraction' because of the scenic break. Clever stuff.

Thanks Phil. Pontrilas version 1.0 is now somewhere in the landfill in the Cayman Islands, due to a series of both fortunate events (admittedly not for the model!) that meant we were able to sell our house and plan our return home to the UK. I have learned many lessons to apply to Pontrilas 2.0 in due course when we settle. In the meantime, here are some pictures of how far I got (not very!), against an image from the Flickr site of Jim Knight. See if you can tell which is the model and which is the real image: I shall leave this thread in existence until such time as the mods decide to delete it, as what would RMWeb be without some long abandoned layouts?

Your scenery belies the scale - if you had told me some of these pictures were 4mm or even 7mm I'd have believed you. I think it comes down to the light - your pictures have a very natural quite harsh wintry light as is often found along the British coastline, which produces very credible shadows in your scenery (particularly the rock faces) which give them a real sense of texture. I assume you have a panel of pure white LEDs overhead?

The best thing about that log wagon is that it truly is of its time - you would struggle to source a log the size of the bottom one these days. Modern farmed timber of the sort they move on railways today doesn't generally get to grow to those sorts of diameters before it's harvested. It's like how you can always tell in older West Coast USA houses that were built with old growth forests. Terrible ecological damage was done, of course, indefensible in the modern age of course, but what extraordinarily beautiful wood it yielded.

Starting to take shape as a 'proper' cliff face now, Anthony! At least you know where you are with these big jobs - it's the tiny "I know there's an electrical fault somewhere" jobs that I find dispiriting.

Johnster is correct, much of the old tropes about gout have been somewhat debunked - there is a far larger universe of things than port and red wine that can trigger gout, and as others have mentioned your triggers will differ from mine. Unfortunately many GPs have not kept up with their reading and their advice regarding gout is 20+ years out of date - if you find this recurring, I strongly suggest a visit to a rheumatologist if you can get a referral (or pay for it privately, if that is an option). Medicine-wise you have drugs that lessen the effect of an acute attack, and drugs that lower the chance of attacks in the first place. In the first category, colchicine and indometacin are popular in the UK because they work and are cheap, overseas they tend to prescribe various flavours of diclofenac, prednisone and other generic anti-inflammatories. In the second category, allopurinol is the main drug of choice, but it has to be started carefully and not in the middle of an attack (starting allopurinol often triggers an attack, because in essence it works by flushing out the uric acid via your kidneys, so tends to cause an initial spike of uric acid in the bloodstream). There is another drug, februxostat, that does much the same thing if you have an allergy to allopurinol. Allopurinol is often spoken of as a 'rest of your life' drug, but modern rheumatologists will disagree - it tends to be a medium term drug which you tail off after a few years once your diet and other aspects of your life are better suited to someone with a gouty disposition. I started on 200mg (a low dose to begin with) and tapered to 100mg after a couple of years. Patients with worse problems than mine can be on 500mg+ daily. The other enormous gout management piece is diet and lifestyle. Finding and avoiding your own trigger foods, keeping well hydrated, being careful with one's feet (not letting them get too cold, in particular) are generally the main elements here. Keeping the weight down, if possible, to relieve stresses on joints generally is also recommended, though you have to be careful with sudden increase in weight-bearing exercise, and crash dieting is also capable of causing a uric acid spike. If you do a lot of walking, decent shoes that take a lot of the impact of walking on rocks, etc. are important too. Ice and/or heat are good pain relievers as well. Invest in a couple of good ice packs or bags, and some heat presses too. There are some that say you shouldn't ice a gouty joint as cooling the joint encourages crystals to form (just as sugar dissolves faster in warmer water). I'm not sure there's much science behind that, and every rheumatologist I have proposed it to thinks it's more 'internet forum science' than real science. Personally I found keeping the joint warm was both more pleasant for me and easier to achieve. Finally, one other thing that kept me going in attacks in my feet was the knowledge that it's relatively easy to keep off one's feet (save for a colchicine induced hop to the bathroom), whereas some people get this sort of attack in joints that would be much harder to deal with - neck and back being the ones I'd really dread.

Given the scale of this layout, I feel this advice is like the old joke about painting the Eiffel Tower, in that on Heaton Lodge by the time you've finished one layer, it's been a week since you started and of course it's dry! Great stuff - enjoyed the video very much.

It's ok, I just assumed everything is upside-down in Australia That's a cracking station scene.